Debatable is a column written by the Otago University Debating Society. The Debating Society welcomes new members and meets at the Business School every Tuesday at 6pm.
For
Every lecturer knows that St Patrick’s Day is a de-facto Dunedin day of rest. To go against this and refuse to kow-tow to this (almost) fundamental human right is an affront to the principles of natural justice. Let's put this into context: students have a lot on our plates right now, characterised by immense loneliness, solitude, stress, and turmoil. How do we cope? Getting together and drinking in the colour green, which is known to reduce stress, improve mood, and sustain creativity. This sacred annual ritual held every 17th of March helps students forget about the horrors of the world (and pretty much everything in general) and gives us the morale boost we need to make it through the Hadean eternity of the Dunedin winter and through to the end of the academic year. The question then turns to: why are some lecturers so cruel as to inhibit this freedom of mind, body, and soul, by pressuring students to miss out on this great day of release by withholding lecture recordings? It’s giving spite. It is utterly purposeless. Students, regardless of whether there is a lecture recording, will simply not show up to class, and this in turn, in the recordings’ absence, generates resentment, causing negative performance and general dissidence by the student body. It’s a downward spiral, and not one conducive to a good relationship between students and lecturers. But at the end of the day, it’s as simple as this: students are adults who can make their own decisions, and it is the job of lecturers to provide us with the tools we are PAYING for to complete our degrees – including lecture recordings, in sickness and in health.
Against
It’s the day after Saint Patrick’s Day; you’re likely waking up hungover and a little disorientated. You scroll through Blackboard, avoiding eye contact with all the assignment deadlines that you’ve likely already missed, until you reach the lecture recording section — only to discover that the previous day's lectures have not been uploaded. Tough shit. Like genuinely, what did you expect? You’ve spent the previous day getting really drunk celebrating Ireland's favourite saint, a holiday that has no relevance in Aotearoa. There’s no shame in it, but at the end of the day it’s a choice which, in the context of the North D ecosystem, seemed reasonable and one that a lot of your fellow students likely made as well. The burning question, however, is should the Uni have to accommodate for the wave of bunking breathas? No. The point of the proliferation of online lectures was to make learning accessible when students couldn’t attend them during Covid, not to enable elective drunken revelry. Previous generations of breathas have not had the luxury of it, and they were fine. At the end of the day, it is only going to be one day of lectures missed anyway. Will it matter in the long-term? Likely not. Most of us are already a couple lectures behind at this point anyways. If you’re that worried, you can always take it upon